Technology and content notes

What ingredients go into making the games work?

The games section of my site is powered and enriched by the following technologies and content.

HTML5 and CSS3

The page structure is marked up with HTML5, and CSS3 instructs your web browser how to colour, position, size, decorate, and even animate, the various items on the page.

JavaScript

Older than almost all of the web browsers still on the market, JavaScript has been adding interactive features to web pages for a long time. Any time you want to have a web page react to something or behave differently depending on the visitor's data or behaviour, you'll find a good use for JavaScript.

jQuery

Making these pages dynamic was a lot easier thanks to jQuery, a library which you wrap over the top of JavaScript to make everything much easier when selecting and interacting with elements on the page.

PHP

Lurking in the background, mostly beyond what you can see on the web page, lies the PHP engine, which allows the web server to process and keep persistent data such as high scores.

SQLite

A lightweight database, SQLite offers a quick and powerful way to store data in a structured way and retrieve just the bits of it you need.

Chart.js

The scatter graphs and bar charts on these pages are generated by the impressive Chart.js library for JavaScript. Fling some data at Chart.js, tweak some settings, and out pops a beautifully drawn graph which embiggens your page with its cromulent data presentation.

Google Fonts

Rather than try to guess what fonts are available on a visitor's web browser, Google Fonts offers a way for a web designer to simply pick the exact fonts and text styles which are needed in a web page and then link to them without anyone needing to install anything.

Google Closure Compiler and Closure Stylesheets

The JavaScript code which powers these pages is not particularly lengthy, but a lot of it is non-functional text which is not needed for the page to work. Google Closure Compiler squeezes all of the air out of the code and makes the source files compact and quicker to download. Google Closure Stylesheets does the same thing with CSS stylesheet files.

Free content

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